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Port Ludlow

Port Ludlow is a bay off Admiralty Inlet near the entrance to Hood Canal, approximately six miles south of Marrowstone Island. In 1841, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes (1798-1877), commander of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, named Port Ludlow in honor of Lieutenant Augustus C. Ludlow, who was killed in the War of 1812 during a battle between the HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake. In 1852, San Francisco investors sent Captain William F. Sayward and John R. Thorndyke to the Pacific Northwest to build a sawmill. Thorndyke filed on a timber claim of 318 acres and built a steam sawmill on Port Ludlow Bay, and the ensuing community was named Port Ludlow.

In 1853, Andrew J. Pope and Captain William C. Talbot, two experienced and well-financed Maine lumbermen, formed a partnership and sailed from San Francisco to Puget Sound in the schooner Julius Pringle, seeking a site for a sawmill. Pope and Talbot stopped first at Discovery Bay, west of Port Townsend, then at Port Ludlow. Finding Port Ludlow already equipped with a mill, they set up operations in Port Gamble on the Kitsap Peninsula. During the 1870s, Port Ludlow was known more for its fine ship building than as a mill town. The town of Port Ludlow, population 200, consisted of a general store, a rundown sawmill, a hotel, a cookhouse, a shipyard, and a few houses and cabins.

In 1879, Pope and Talbot purchased the Port Ludlow sawmill at auction for $64,850. After the addition of new equipment, the mill, doing business as the Puget Mill Company, turned out 125,000 board feet of lumber a day and built ships. The town's population swelled to 500, but a depression hit the United States in 1890 and market gluts and poor prices caused the sawmill to close. In 1898, the lumber market rebounded and the sawmill was reopened. The Pope and Talbot mills at Port Ludlow and Port Gamble supplied much of the lumber for the rebuilding of San Francisco following the earthquake and fire of April 1906. Between 1890 and 1935, Port Ludlow was a boom-or-bust economy with a great demand for spruce for military aircraft construction during World War I (1917-1919) followed by the Great Depression (1929-1939). The mill closed permanently in December 1935 and the plant was dismantled.

During World War II (1941-1945), the company houses were barged from Port Ludlow to other locations to help alleviate housing shortages. By 1950, Port Ludlow's commerce was dead. On August 12, 1961, the Hood Canal Bridge opened, linking Jefferson and Kitsap counties. The Olympic Peninsula was now easily accessible and it became readily apparent to Pope and Talbot, Inc. that Port Ludlow had some real estate potential. In 1968, the Pope and Talbot Corporation repurchased their formerly held land and developed the planned community of Port Ludlow. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in the year 2000 Port Ludlow had a population of 1,968.

Historical Photos of old Port Ludlow (1865 to 1920), Click here.